Connecting Vicarious Experience to Practice

Abstract

Looking at student teachers' assignments in an educational foundations course, we explore the function of vicarious experience in relation to several candidates' practical knowledge. Finding that students could develop resonance-type responses to a multitude of segments from autobiographical works, we explore what can be recognized about the usefulness of such responses in relation to particular students' practical knowledge and action. Three hypotheses are developed concerning the connections we recognized among vicarious experience, resonance, and practical knowledge.Did you ever cry at the movies? Do you find it hard to turn off the TV in the middle of a suspense thriller? If your answer to such questions is "yes," do you also maintain that such vicarious experiences have nothing to do with the way you live your life? Or, do you suspect that your experience of a work of art (good or bad) is intimately connected to what you have to offer in daily life and academically? We are not debating these issues directly in this article, but they are an important context for our work. We believe that connections between vicarious experiences and practice are likely. We want to explore them here by focusing on student teachers' interactions with experiential autobiographical writing. If the experience of even small slices of such works intimately connects to a student teacher's practical knowledge and action, it is of primary importance in teacher education, not in the sense of literary education, but in the sense of teacher development.

Answering Damarin’s Call: How iOS Apps Approach Diversity, Equity, and Multiculturalism

“…Narratives can effectively engage students by harnessing their imaginations (Conle, 2003), and experiential narratives in particular can be used to address morality issues and provide diverse perspectives (Oser, 1994;Puka, 1990). In the context of digital narratives, McShay and Gilchrist (2008) explain that they help students uncover their own racial and socio-economic identities, which can in turn impact how students come to understand diverse perspectives in their own lives (Conle, Li, & Tan, 2002). The narratives identified in these apps range from being passive digital storybooks with audio narration to simple, story-based animations through fully interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style formats.…”

On the Epistemology of Narrative Research in Education

“…Conle, Li and Tan's () ‘Connecting Vicarious Experience to Practice,’ suffers from similar validity problem. In their research, they argue that reading biographies enhances the practical knowledge of participants, in this case, student teachers.…”

Chapter 12. The role of stories in teacher development

“…We are so used to the paradigmatic mode of knowing through our educational experience that we tend to think that stories are just anecdotes and do not qualify as legitimate knowledge. We also tend to summarize and abstract our experience (Conle, Li, & Tan, 2002). We need to recognize the legitimacy of stories and focus on details of each piece of our experience.…”